Introduction

This page willbriefly survey paleoecological records from sites with Chickasaw cultural affiliation held by the Neotoma Paleoecology Database. If you would like to explore these records or other Neotoma data further, we are happy to help with that, so please reach out!

About Neotoma

Neotoma was formed in 2006 as a federated database constituted by a set of more specialized paleoecological databases. This means that Neotoma brings together paleoecological data from a range of proxy types (e.g., pollen, charcoal, testate amoebae), regions (e.g., North America, Latin America, Europe), and time periods (e.g., Pliocene, Pleistocene, Holocene). Neotoma incorporates data collected over more than 150 years.

The Neotoma database is a relational database, a structure whose primary unit is the entity - essentially a table of data in which rows are observations, and columns are variables. Three important entities in Neotoma are sites, collection units, and datasets. A site is the place that fossil specimens come from, like a particular lake. A collection unit describes the means by which the material from a site was collected. It could be a particular sedimentary core from a lake site. A dataset might be the pollen you counted in the core at each stratigraphic horizon of the sedimentary core. There are other entities in the database too.

Neotoma and Native Lands

Neotoma contains records from upwards of 22,000 sites. Many of these sites are affiliated with native lands. In particular, many of those sites come from federally recognized reservations.

The following table counts the number of sites (n) from Neotoma that fall within the borders of federally recognized reservations. The Chickasaw reservation has some of the most Neotoma sites of any reservation.

Neotoma Resources on the Chickasaw Reservation

The following map shows the location of Neotoma sites on the Chickasaw Reservation. Although there are (as of April 2024) 34 distinct sites, some of them are close together, so 34 dots are not clearly distinguishable on the map.

And the following table lists some information about those sites.

We can further inspect the sites by the kinds of data they contain. Neotoma sites from the Chickasaw Reservation have data about vertebrates, macroinvertebrates, diatoms, and water chemistry.

Not all of the physical specimens associated with these data have been preserved, and Neotoma doesn’t have perfect information about the disposition of the physical specimens when they do exist. But what we can definitely say is that for many of these datasets, the data contributor has told us that the University of Oklahoma and the Oklahoma Archaeological Survey hold physical specimens associated with the dataset.

Other Neotoma resources with Chickasaw Cultural Affiliation

In addition to the Neotoma resources on the Chickasaw Reservation, we’ve used the Native Land mapping project (native-land.ca) to filter for Neotoma sites on other lands with Chickasaw cultural affiliation.

On this other piece of land with Chickasaw cultural affiliation (named Chikashsha Iyaakni’ on the native-land.ca website), there are 85 distinct sites with data on a range of proxy types.

The repositories associated with the physical specimens for these datasets are more various compared to those on the Chickasaw Reservation.